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Achieving digital performance

Are you a digital high performer? Time to rotate to the new.

Overview

Most large businesses are committing to the digital technologies that are transforming their industries. But Accenture analysis reveals that the vast majority are not yet translating these digital investments into better financial performance and, importantly, new growth.

To help C-suite leaders better understand the interplay between digital and financial performance, Accenture has created the Digital Performance Index, based on our study of 343 leading global companies across eight industries.

We invite you to explore the digital performance of your company and to benchmark it against its peers.

Key Findings

Eighteen percent of companies are Digital Leaders. They demonstrate strong digital capabilities, but have yet to generate sustained and impressive financial returns.

The 6 percent who are Digital High Performers go further by optimizing their digital investments through more strategic capabilities. This gives them 44 percent higher revenue growth scores over Digital Leaders and helps explain their more consistent performance.

As a result, investors reward Digital High Performers, giving them a Future Value score 48 percent higher than Digital Leaders.

Recommendations

Digital High Performers master rotating to the new

Few Digital High Performers are digital natives. Yet they manage to use digital technology as both an enabler and a driver of change in their legacy organizations. In short, they master rotating to the new.

Rotating to the new breaks with convention. In the past, many companies exploited new digital opportunities by separating new businesses from existing core business which were treated as cash cows. Instead, companies should no longer distinguish between the core and the new, but focus on developing new digital opportunities within existing core businesses.

To be successful with this approach requires four key elements:

Transformation of the Core, to drive investment capacity

Growth from the Core, to sustain growth

Growth from New Businesses, through experimentation and failing fast

Wise Pivot, to balance investments between the near term and the long term, between the core and the new

Digital Higher Performers apply digital in all four areas of business activity

Digital Strategy

Digital High Performers leverage the collective intelligence of disruptors, third-party partners and even competitors to capture growth opportunities. And they do so at speed.

Digital Production and Delivery

They use smart systems and rich data to create new revenue generating services that add customer value to existing product lines.

Digital Customer Experience

They tailor services and customer engagement at scale, using data analytics, social media and customer service transformation.

Digital Culture and Operations

They actively renew their organization by optimizing digital infrastructure, upskilling employees or formalizing "fast fail" methods. They experiment and reinvent their business rather than pursue incremental change.

About the Digital Performance Index

The Digital Performance Index quantitatively assesses the level of digital investment and progress across four business functions. Forty-two business activities and 117 detailed behavior metrics are evaluated to support the framework. This multi-layered approach enables a comprehensive view of companies’ digital integration across the full breadth of business activities.

Both the level of implementation of digital technology and the quality of its integration were assessed. Scores, on a scale of 1 to 4, reflect a company’s relative position against its industry peer set (1 indicating performance significantly below peer average and 4 significantly above peer average). Digital high performance corresponds with a score which falls into the top quartile of a company’s industry peer set.

The Digital Performance Index was developed by Accenture Research and the Accenture Institute for High Performance www.accenture.com/institute

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